Friday, January 29, 2010

A Message To Whoever Is Supposedly Leading The Anti-War Left, On The Day Tony Blair Waved His Dick In The Face Of History For The Last Time, While Laying The Ground For War With IranSlow handclap, geniuses.

Boy, that protest really rocked, eh? I hope at least one of you got laid.

Update!: Additional cursewords that would only bring contempt upon the author.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

I haven't been paying too much attention to the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry, largely because I'm cynically assuming it's going to return a verdict of Whoops, 100% Accidental Bloodbath, Tut-Tut.

I am, however, loving the reactions it's bringing out around the internet.

Twittering anti-war lefty types seem to veer from cold suspicion to outbursts of wild optimism every time generic civil servant (x) makes a vague admission that yes, the case for war may possibly have been full of bullshit.

Why this should be, I have no idea. Obviously the case for war was crammed to bursting with bullshit, bulging and groaning at the seams. Hilariously though, this inquiry marks at least the third time that the British state has told the anti-war left that the word gullible isn't in the dictionary, and the third instance of enthusiastic, puppy-eyed lefties saying Really? Surely not, rushing off to check the OED.

I imagine that Chilcot will cast Tony Blair as a shifty, pompous, dishonest twerp who sent the armed forces into a boiling disaster, much as an inquiry into Myra Hindley's behaviour would probably raise doubts over her suitability for childminding duties. Sadly, the chances of it finding criminal culpability in the former PM's aggressive warmaking are somewhere between jack and shit, and Jack just nipped into Ladbrokes to put a whopping great bet on a whitewash.

I guess this is my point - the question of the war's legality is an enticing carrot for anti-war types to chase in perpetuity. I'm working on the assumption that for some, a fiery official condemnation would prove them right once and for all and force the nation to face reality, as if the last seven years weren't quite real enough.

Whether Chilcot nails Blair's balls to the floor or not, the war's defenders are not about to throw up their hands in horror and join in the massive bout of Bodysnatchers-style finger-pointing and howling. There will be no Thank you protestors for being right about this epic clusterfuck after-show party.

A sizeable number of the war's cheerleaders have cheerfully blown off its horrific consequences, from the Iraqi insurgents' bloodbaths, through the sectarian death squads and the ensuing civil war and micro-partitioning of the country, by waving their hands and chanting the magical exculpatory incantation, Al-Qaeda terrorists ate our homework!

These people would rather cram their scrotums down their own throats than give an inch to Chilcot, and the odds of say, the Times, running a Sorry we fed you all lies editorial are woeful.

Further, regardless of the outcome, the former PM isn't going to be clapped in irons, chained to a heavy radiator and thrown into the Thames. He's going to continue shambling around the world jamming great fistfuls of dollars into his pockets in the full glare of the public eye.

No, the only service the inquiry can perform is to utterly expose the lunacy at the heart of our decision to join the Americans in their deranged Iraq enterprise, and to make sure the lesson is drummed into the public one more time, hard enough to prevent even partial repeats. Here's a brief recap of exactly how we wound up taking part...

Let's recall that the Americans invaded Iraq to fend off Iraqi aggression.

I'll write that again, for clarity. The United States - the world's only remaining superpower, with a defence budget of five hundred billion dollars per annum - invaded the castrated, two-soldiers-in-a-Fiat-Panda dictatorship of Iraq in self-defence.

Now, I can already hear the objections about Tony Blair's humanitarian agenda, but none of that matters at all. Tony wasn't in charge - the US was deploying the most terrifying military machine in history, and made it clear they could squash the Iraqi military like an asthmatic beetle without our help.

This was the Bush White House's war, and they wouldn't start babbling about painting schools and helping those poor women vote until the collapse of Iraq had turned the country into the Hammer House of Horror. Their justifications were the terrifying, anthrax-filled model planes that Saddam might use to genocide Dogdick, Alabama and those awful mushroom clouds that would be shaped like smoking guns, or whatever.

And the plan? The plan went like this - Invade Iraq = Freedom!

You know when you've got a suitcase that's so full you can't shut it, and you wedge everything down and shove a fork through the zipper and pull to no avail, and eventually two of your mates have to sit on the damn thing until you eventually get the bulging, straining case shut?

That is just how full of bullshit the case for war was.

The Americans were standing, pumped-up and raring to dive into the new Vietnam they've been looking for ever since they fled the original with their tails between their legs, loudly bellowing that they would totally have kicked those skinny pyjama guys asses, if their buddies hadn't stopped them...

...And the former Prime Minister looked at this situation and thought, This looks like the kind of ultraviolent dipshit escapade I could really get my teeth into!

So there's your one and only question for the PM on Friday - What the hell were you thinking, numbnuts?
Of course, we know the answer to that one, but I don't think it'll do the country any harm to hear Tony Blair spell out his reasoning, one more time.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

You know, I'm as militant an atheist as you're likely to come across in this country. Get me going and I'll bore you to tears with strident lectures on the ludicrousness of a worldview based entirely upon bizarre and illogical fantasies dreamt up by mystics in an age without soap.

That said, I'd no more tell a man that his religion is a ridiculous, childish fiction without provocation than I'd tell him his wife is a hideous old boot and his children as thick as shitty jam, even if the latter were true.

I realise that, in the pursuit of human enlightenment and progress, I should really be going Defcon One and nuking every religious believer I meet, but I have this whole basic human decency problem with going radge at strangers and friends alike for their nuttier notions.

Anyone who believes that the world operates according to the will of a benevolent intergalactic space hero is in for a brutal and horrible WTF? moment sooner rather than later, and I'm more than happy to piss on their chips if they're getting all up in my grill about it. Truth is though, most people don't.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

"Any fight you're going to have eventually, have it now... We should pick the time, not them".

...And a belated happy new year to Chris Hitchens, who I'm starting to suspect is neither misguided nor a deluded optimist, but rather a brutal psychopath and a raving homicidal maniac.

The subject matter is, of course, the hated Iranian regime: aggressions and provocations by, and the tonnage of bombs we will have to drop on the Iranian populace in order to bring them the joy of freedom.

Today's tipple is Johnnie Walker Black Label, and the crimes of the mullahs - or the Revolutionary Guard, as Hitch now terms the Iranian regime - they go into countries where they're not wanted, arm violent insurgent groups and militias, shoot protestors in the streets, send death squads to the other side of the planet, seek nuclear weapons and they torture, rape and disappear prisoners. "The existence of such regimes is incompatible with us," Hitchens says, with a straight face.

Fear not, though - Chris has the solution...

"...If there is going to be a confrontation, we should pick the time, not them... They’ll say I’m asking for war, but I’ll say no. I’m not. I’m recognizing that someone is looking for war. We should be firm enough to say “Alright.” We didn’t look for it. We’ve tried everything short of war for a long time. Everything..."

Reel your eyes back into their sockets, folks, because Hitchens is actually contending that the Iranians - whose experience of war in the last five decades was fending off a western-backed assault from our previous intolerable modern Hitler, Saddam Hussein, at the cost of half a million lives - are gearing up to make war upon their neighbours. This aggression will not stand, man.

Sharp-eyed readers will note that we, the injured and passive western democracies, have actually attacked, invaded and currently occupy the territories immediately to Iran's west and north, not to mention bombing Yemen to their south. If we include the Israelis in our thinking - and we really should - we can add Lebanon, Gaza and Syria to the list of local countries we have been forced to attack.

Should we mention that two of the US presidential candidates threatened to attack Iran with nuclear weapons during the recent primaries; and that prominent public figures have been calling for war with Iran for most of the decade?

Still, let us not forget that the Iranians are warmongering, irrational lunatics who cannot be deterred.

Other readers might notice that our attempts to democratise Iraq and Afghanistan have been a long, outrageously expensive and horrifically bloody nightmare, and that Hitchens is one of the few commentators who has refused to budge an inch from his previous, lunatic aggressiveness. Thank God, Hitch knows how to avoid a re-run of our hideous failures...

"(We'll say) ...We're not going to stay. We're handing the country over to you. We're not occupying... (Earlier) ....How many Iranian dissidents are going to be nationalistically upset by an intervention that comes in and removes the Revolutionary Guards?"

How many indeed? Perhaps our troops will be greeted with flowers and our not-occupation will pay for itsnotself during this hypothetical war, in which we might as well clad our soldiers in natty white uniforms with red crosses on the front. Where these soldiers are going to come from is another matter, but not one that I expect to trouble Hitchens' fevered dreams of explosions and righteous violence.

Note: Comments are off because Haloscan are demanding payment, and I'm a skinflint. Can't work out how to enable the blogger comments again without utterly knackering my template, so if any readers can suggest a workaround by email, I'd be grateful...